‘Our toilet’s been broken for three weeks,’ she told him.
‘We can’t get a plumber. The landlady’s tried.’
‘Is that a fact? Broken is it?’
‘Plumbers don’t live here any more,’ explained Brenda, echoing what Freda had told her. ‘It’s on account of the high rents. Plumbers can’t afford to live. It’s the same with window cleaners,’ she added.
‘I’ll fix it for you,’ he said. And too late she realised what she had done.
‘Oh no really, there’s no need,’ she protested.
But he wouldn’t be put off. ‘I’ll be glad to. I’m good at the plumbing. Will I bring the tools round after work?
‘It’s not my toilet,’ said Brenda. ‘I’m not sure that the landlady—’
‘I’ll fetch the wherewithal from me lodgings and be round when I’m finished.’
‘You’re very kind,’ said Brenda feebly, and returned with her beaker of soup to the bench. She stared at a bottle of Chateau Neuf du Pape and dreaded what Freda would say. She could almost hear her – ‘You did what? You asked that lout from the bogs of Tipperary to mend our loo?’ She wondered if she could sneak him upstairs without Freda knowing, or the landlady for that matter. Perhaps she could persuade him to wrap a duster round the end of his hammer.
Freda was not enjoying being off work. She hadn’t the money to go down town and enjoy her leisure. She polished the surrounds of the floor and wedged the window open with Brenda’s tennis racket. The room lacked character, she thought, looking critically at the yellow utility furniture and the ladies in crinolines walking in pairs across the wallpaper. There was no colour scheme – nothing matched; there was no unity of design. Every time she made some little improvement, like arranging a curtain round the washbasin near the door, it only drew attention to the cracked tiles and the yards of antiquated piping climbing in convoluted loops up the wall. On the shelf she had improvised above the fireplace were some paperbacks, two library books and a bottle of H.P. sauce that Brenda had carelessly placed. Dissatisfied by all she saw, she went discontentedly on to the landing and carried the milk bottles downstairs. Lying on the doormat was an envelope addressed to her. When she opened it she thought she might faint. It was as if life until this moment had been spent underground or beneath the sluggish waters of a river. Now, as she read the words he had written, she shot to the surface, up into the blinding sunlight and the sweet-tasting air:
My dear Freda,
If it is permissible may I call after work to offer my respects.
Your friend,
Vittorio.
She clutched the note to her breast and flew in her fluffy bedroom-slippers up the stairs. Why can’t life always be like this, she thought, smiling and smiling at the lovely room with its cheerful wallpaper and the gay curtain that hid the waste-pipe of the washbasin. She revolved slowly in front of the open window, the street turning with her: the shining bonnets of the cars at the kerb, the spearheads of the painted railings, the thin black trees that were bouncing in the wind. Above the gardens devoid of leaf save for laurel bush and privet hedge, the pigeons rose and dipped and rose again, lifting to the rooftops. A woman in a long plaid skirt blew like a paper boat along the pavement.
Freda couldn’t stop smiling. She closed the window and boiled a kettle of water, reaching to the shelf above the cooker for her toilet bag with her own special soap and her own clean flannel. She’d had to hide her things from Brenda, who was less than fussy – who could wipe her neck or her shoes on the dishcloth or her underclothes, all with equal impartiality, if nothing else was available. She’d have to tell her to go out for the evening. Anywhere would do: there was a new film on at the Odeon called Super Dick. She carried the blue plastic bowl filled with warm water into the living room and knelt in front of the gas fire. Grown solemn now and a little peaked, the tender sensual smile gone from her mouth, she curled her pudgy toes on the worn hearthrug and began to wash herself. It would be nice to buy a piece of steak for Vittorio. She couldn’t afford any for herself, but he’d appreciate her appetite was poor the day after her mother’s funeral. And she’d provide a salad of lettuce and green peppers and make a real dressing of garlic and lemon juice, such as he was used to. As for Brenda, she could go to the chippie for her supper. She was always saying she didn’t care for food, that it was sheer affectation to put herbs in things. People who baked food in the oven, she said, were daft – you could fry everything in a pan twice as quick. Despite her private schooling and her advantages, she’d been brought up on spam and chips and powdered eggs, and it was no wonder her husband Stanley had gone to the Little Legion every night. She couldn’t understand why suddenly she felt such resentment towards Brenda – the thought of her was spoiling her anticipation of the night to come. She frowned and slapped the soapy flannel against the soft contours of her arm. It’s my room, she told herself. I found it. I have every right to take my chances, to live my life. She felt refined out of existence by the sameness and regularity of each day, the brushing of her clothes in the morning and the cleaning of her teeth at night. ‘There is something more,’ she murmured, her lips moving, her eyes fixed on the mutilated pattern of the rug. ‘I am not Brenda – I do want something.’ She had been squeezing the flannel in her hands, and the carpet was quite sodden with water. Shuffling backwards on her knees she dried herself on a towel. It would have been better if Vittorio had given her more time to prepare for his visit: she hated rushing down town and returning home with minutes to spare, her face all red from the hair-dryer. How should she behave when he came? There was no question of outright seduction – not when she was so recently bereaved. Perhaps she could be silent and rather wistful – not exactly droopy, but less aggressive than he had previously known her – so as to arouse his protective feelings. Come the day of the Outing she might then lay her hand on his sleeve and thank him for his understanding. Absently she stroked the edge of the wooden fender, thick with dust, and tilted her head backwards to avoid the heat of the fire which already had begun to mottle the smoothness of her pale cheeks. She stared at the ceiling and her mouth opened to emit a sound half-way between a sigh and a groan – ‘Aaah,’ she went, kneeling as if in supplication. ‘Aaaah, Vittorio!’ Was she right about his feelings for her? He must like her. Otherwise why did he spend every afternoon chatting to her? And she’d seen the way his eyes flickered up and down her jumper when he thought she wasn’t watching. He did fancy her, but how could she encourage him? God knows what Brenda had said or done to get Rossi into such a state of randy expectancy, but whatever it was it wouldn’t work for Vittorio. He was a man of sensibilities and everything was against her – his background, his nationality, the particular regard he had for women or a category of womanhood to which she did not belong. By the strength of her sloping shoulders, the broad curve of her throat, the dimpled vastness of her columnar thighs, she would manoeuvre him into her arms. I will be one of those women, she thought, painted naked on ceilings, lolling amidst rose-coloured clouds. She straightened and stared at a chair. She imagined how she might mesmerise him with her wide blue eyes. Wearing a see-through dressing-gown chosen from a Littlewoods catalogue, she would open the door to him: ‘Forgive me, I have been resting – the strain you know. My mother was particularly dear to me—’ All Italians, all foreigners were dotty about their mothers; he would expect it of her. She would not actually have to gnash her teeth but imply that she did so – internally. Rumpling her newly washed hair, the black nylon sleeve of her gown sliding back to reveal one elbow, she would press her hand to her brow and tell him the doctor had prescribed sedatives: ‘Do sit down, we are quite alone. Brenda has elected to go to the cinema.’ Against her will her mind dwelt on an image of Brenda in the cellar, cobwebs lacing her hair, and Rossi, hands trembling, tearing her newspaper to shreds. I will rip you to pieces, she thought; and her hand flew to her mouth as if she had spoken aloud. Beyond the romantic dreams, the little girl waiting to be cuddled, it was power of a
kind she was after. It is not so much that I want him, she thought, but that I would like him to want me.
Slumped dripping upon the carpet, she gazed into the glowing mantel of the fire and rehearsed a small wistful smile.
Brenda waited a long time on the stairs to see who would arrive first. She had read Freda’s note suggesting she go to the pictures – it was not so much a suggestion as a command: there was even 40p left on the mantelpiece. She must have been to the post office to draw out her savings. There was a bowl of salad on the landing and a lump of meat, curiously flattened and spiked with garlic, lying on a plate beneath a clean teatowel.
At four-thirty the landlady came up from her basement flat on her way to her pottery class at the Arts Centre. She unlocked the back door and turfed the pregnant cat out on to the concrete patio.
‘Damn thing,’ she said, smiling at Brenda crouched on the stairs.
The cat, with sloping belly, stood on its hind legs and scrambled frantically with outstretched claws at the pane of glass. Freda said the landlady hadn’t enough to occupy her time, going off to throw pots like that; but Brenda thought it was an inconsiderate judgment: they had never seen what she did on her clay wheel – she might have been another Henry Moore for all they knew.
‘Shut up,’ said Brenda when the landlady had gone. She peered through the bannister rails at the cat running on the spot, irritated by the noise of its paws on the glass panels of the door.
She had come home exhausted from her thieving. Repeating her performance with the wardrobe, she had retrieved the brandy bottle from its place behind the lavatory bowl and buried it beneath the load of washing. When she wheeled the basket down the alleyway, she imagined the bottle breaking and the liquid trickling through the slats of woven straw and Rossi, like a bloodhound scenting the trail of alcohol, running up the street after her, nose quivering, black curls blown backwards in the wind. He would call the police and have her arrested. Worse still, he might seize her by the arm and whisper insidiously into her ear his sensual desires, demanding she remain passive while he committed an offence in exchange for his not informing on her.
Outside the back door the agitation of the cat increased. She thought about letting it in, but she didn’t dare: it might ravish Freda’s steak and piddle on the lino. From behind the basement door came the piteous cries of its last kitten. The landlady had kept it, out of concern for the mother’s feelings, but lately the cat had taken to biting it ferociously about the ears. Freda thought the animal ought to be sent to the vet and aborted: it was sheer wantoness to produce more offspring – she pointed out that if human beings had the same fertility rate a woman could have three hundred babies in five years. She said you’d need 2,000 eggs a week to give them all a good breakfast.
‘I wonder,’ said Brenda aloud, ‘what the kitten thinks now its mummy doesn’t like it.’
She wished someone would try to savage her every time she made a friendly gesture. She was just working out how happily she could exist, left entirely alone, when there was a knock at the front door. She wanted instantly to hide, but she knew it was no use, so she ran down the stairs with a fixed smile on her face, ready to leave immediately should it be Vittorio with his little silken Zapata moustache flopping above his mouth, or Freda back from her shopping. It was neither. It was Patrick in a shiny black suit and a clean white shirt with a badly frayed collar.
‘My word,’ she said, letting him into the dark hall, ‘you do look smart.’
His appearance alarmed her. He was so evidently out to impress, she would not have been surprised if, like a conjurer, he had whipped a vase of flowers from behind his back and presented them to her.
‘Ah well,’ he said, holding a canvas bag for her inspection, ‘didn’t I leave early to get me tools?’
She led him up the stairs, pulling faces as she went to relieve her feelings, sticking her tongue out at the brown-painted walls, telling him silently to drop dead and leave her alone. As they turned to go up the second flight of stairs, passing the cooker and the pungent slice of meat under its tea-towel, she was forced to smile at him and say insincerely: ‘It is kind of you, Patrick, to give up your time.’
The bathroom had a geyser riveted to the wall above a large tub stained with rust.
‘It’s old,’ said Patrick, looking at the four curved feet splayed out upon the cracked lino and the dust lying like a carpet beneath the belly of the bath.
Outside the window, open to relieve the odour of stale urine, the yard lay like a jigsaw puzzle, dissected by washing line and paving stone. On the back wall, above the black and barren stem of the rambling rose, stood a row of tin cans and broken bottles placed to repel small boys.
‘That’s it,’ said Brenda pointing at the offending cistern in its bed of cement. Patrick climbed on to the lavatory seat in his sparkling boots and fiddled with the chain. ‘It won’t flush,’ he said. Along the line of his sleeve appeared beads of plaster and a smear of rust.
‘Your clothes—’ began Brenda.
But already he was removing his jacket and handing it to her for safety. Lifting the heavy lid of the cistern, enough for him to get an arm in up to the elbow, he splashed about in the water, his shoulders raised so that she could see the elasticated top of his underpants holding his shirt in check.
‘It’s the ballcock,’ he volunteered.
‘Is that bad?’ she asked, praying it was and he would give up and go home quick.
‘Don’t you fret. I can do it,’ he assured her. ‘Nothing simpler.’
He jumped to the floor and looked in his tool bag for a spanner and a ball of string. She could see the damp cuff of his shirt clinging to the shape of his wrist.
‘Look at that,’ she said. ‘You’re ruining your shirt.’
‘I was wondering,’ he asked, his Brylcreamed head bent low. ‘Would you have any objection to me removing me shirt?’
‘I don’t mind,’ she cried, though secretly she did, and her eyes narrowed as she spoke.
Without his shirt, his hands and head looked as if they belonged to someone else, so red and full of blood against the white softness of his trunk. He had a nice chest, not at all pimply, with only a dusting of freckles between his shoulders. When he swung up a sleeve to release his shirt she glimpsed the bright ginger pit of his arm. Back he climbed on to the lavatory seat to probe about among the pipes and the plaster, and she hung his shirt on a nail behind the door and caught a faint smell of mould, as if he never aired his clothes but packed them halfdried into a drawer.
‘Jesus, it’s cold,’ he said, feeling the chill air coming from the window.
‘You could borrow my dressing gown,’ said Brenda, and he protested there was no need, the small pout of his beer belly overlapping the waistband of his trousers as he twisted to thank her.
‘But you must,’ she insisted, thinking there was very much a need; she couldn’t bear to have him standing there half-naked. She went down the stairs, closing the bathroom door carefully behind her. She stood on the landing for a moment in case Freda had returned, but all was quiet and she crept like a thief into her room and went to the wardrobe, lifting out her dressing-gown, tugging it free from its place between Freda’s dresses hung in polythene wrappers. The bottle of brandy, wedged in the folds of a purple cloak, fell on its side and rolled to the edge of the door. Thrusting it further into the recesses of the wardrobe, she ran back upstairs with her dressing-gown still on its hanger.
‘That’s nice,’ he said, as she helped him into it.
Her fingers brushed the top of his arm rough with goose-pimples, and she stepped back not meaning to have touched him. The sleeves only came down to his elbows, and when he climbed back on to the lavatory the pleats of the bright blue dressing-gown swirled out like a skirt above his trousers and the gleaming tops of his cherry-blossom boots.
At first Vittorio sat on the chair by the gas fire where Freda had placed him, but she needed a man to open the bottle of wine he had brought and they both s
tood by the table, she fiddling with two glasses and he with the bottle between his knees to drag out the cork. He wore a black polonecked jumper and a coat of real leather with two stylish vents at the back.
‘It’s strange,’ she said, sipping her wine. ‘I loved her, but we were not close.’
‘Yes,’ he replied, averting his eyes from her black nylon negligée, looking instead at the cheap utility furniture and the curved railings of the balcony reflecting the light of the street lamp.
‘Are you close to your mother?’ she asked him, not quite at ease, wishing almost he hadn’t come. He said No, she lived in Italy.
‘To your heart,’ she persisted, touching her breast and looking at him earnestly. She was dreadfully hungry. The hairdresser had made her wait a long time and she hadn’t had any lunch.
‘Brenda has gone to the pictures to see Super Dick, she told him, thinking it was a provocative title. She walked back and forth from the table to the window.
‘I would have thought …’ he began, but she lowered her head and he fell silent.
‘Brenda’s different from me,’ she murmured. ‘When I found her on the Finchley Road I did think …’ and she too trailed into silence and left the sentence unfinished.
He had brought her a peach in a skein of tissue paper and she rolled the fruit between her palms.
‘How kind of you,’ she said, lifting his beautiful coat from the bed and taking it to the wardrobe in case she spilled wine upon it. When she opened the door a bottle of brandy rolled from the hem of her cloak and fell on to the nail of her big bare toe.
‘Christ,’ she cried, bringing her hand to her mouth and contracting her foot with the pain. ‘Brenda,’ she told him, voice husky with suppressed violence, ‘never puts anything away.’
She stuffed the bottle behind the hanging dresses and prayed he hadn’t noticed. She didn’t know how to broach the subject of food: if she mentioned the steak it might seem as if she were forcing him to stay – as if it were all planned. She poured herself out another glass of wine and gulped it down. He wasn’t very talkative; he was making her do all the work. If he went quite soon she could eat the steak herself and the salad. She hadn’t had time to make the garlic dressing, and how could she go out now on to the landing and start messing about with lemons. She was sweating from the pain of her crushed foot and the low rumblings of her empty stomach. Unable to contain herself, she nibbled a chocolate biscuit that Brenda had left on the mantelpiece and listened to the sound of hammering one floor above.
The Bottle Factory Outing Page 4